Headwaters has been around a long time.
Gunnison Country elder George Sibley founded the conference 33 years ago as a way to help Western State College (formerly Colorado State Normal School) better collaborate with the community.
His was a big Four Corners vision of community -- including the region and beyond, not just the Town or County of Gunnison. Though that was always a core focus. Particularly as many Western students stayed around, got involved, made itki* their Rocky Mountain home.
Sibley wanted a three-way gathering of liberal minds from the wider region to come together as European-Americans, Estadounidenses hispanos y latinos, and the diverse peoples of Turtle Island we call American Indians, Native Americans, Indigenous.
The intent was to share, cross-fertilize, brainstorm and wrestle with provocative issues, like Frederick Jackson Turner’s declaration of the End of the Frontier. Over the decades, Headwaters has fulfilled that vision, brought to town wonderful speakers from all three of these traditions and given those of us politically minded citizens on the Western Slope a safe haven for radical [Latin> “to the root”] ideas.
But this year was different.
Dr. John [Hausdoerffer] of Western’s Clark Family School of Environment and Sustainability chose not to line up speakers to discuss “Land Back” – the latest political rallying cry for our Indigenous neighbors locally and nationally.
Headwaters dove even deeper into this “trouble,” as ecofeminist philosopher Dr. Donna Haraway would call it (Staying with the Trouble). How do we as American citizens come to terms with our nation’s colonizing past, our imperfect union, and the issue of Indigenous genocide that’s never been reconciled properly in our history, or in our lives.
Western’s Doctor John walked the talk. He consulted with Indigenous advisors, and together they crafted an Indigenous-led event to deconstruct the unsettling “Land Back” slogan for us climate-liberals, fiscal hawks & neo-colonials:
“Right, dude. Give Manhattan back to the Indians? No way!”
As I learned this past Headwaters, that is and isn’t what’s meant. Yes, reconciliation is absolutely needed for the peoples of this continent, many of whose lands were illegally taken away under the racist slogan “Manifest Destiny.” But “Land Back” is less about their ownership -- a Western Civilization concept unknown among most Indigenous societies -- and more about all of us as peoples bringing land back into our lives: immigrant and native, settler and indigenous.
At this Anthropoic point in our history as five-fingered hominids, on a planet with cascading collapse systems of overshoot and climate change, our Indigenous fellow Americans are telling us to breathe in the land, to take the land back into our decisions and choices, to treat itki* with respect –- and not just humans of the land but all the land’s biota: fauna, flora and funga.
Headwaters gave our local, state and national Indigenous voices a platform. Not for our History or Herstory, but for the peoples of Native America, speaking for themselves.
The keynoter was Dr. Melissa Nelson (professor of Indigenous Sustainability at Arizona State University, and the editor of Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future) touching on displacement impacts, co-management of public lands and Traditional Ecological Knowledge [TEK].
Indigenous guests included poet Jarrett Ziemer; historians Rick Waters and Richard Williams; Ute leader Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk; Nimiipuu educator Ciarra S. Greene; artist Marten Pinnecoose; graduate student Keeley Jock; tribal worker Dorsey Dick; filmmaker Conner Ryan and his beautifully important film, “The Spirit of the Peaks;” Rick Chavolla of New York City and California; university vice-president Leslie Taylor; Utah’s Samantha Eldridge; Asian-American urban research fellow Evelyn Mayo; and just a sprinkle of Euro-American voices: Montezuma Land Conservancy’s Molly Maizel and Western’s Dr. Melanie Armstrong, Dr. Matthew Aronson, and Doctor John.
Western’s Indigenous director of poetry, CMarie Fuhrman’s poem on land acknowledgements brought the entire conference home to “Land Back” and what we truly ought to be acknowledging as universities, as nations, as peoples.
Okay, I’m embedded in capitalism like the rest of us. I get itki*.
“Land Back” means a helluva lot more than just property rights or the social injustices of genocide, slavery “Black Lives Matter,” or environmental ecocide “Earth First!.”
Itki* means everything.
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*“Ki” is a grammatical neologism Indigenous science writer Robin Wall Kimmerer advocates for using in place of “it”, “its”, “it’s” or “itself” to help correct English’s objectification of phenomena when speaking of objects in the natural world. The neologist term is harvested from the last syllable of a longer word in Potawatomi for an “earth being.” ... As a pre-school teacher I learned that we humans learn best by going through the known to the unknown. Instead of substituting “ki” for “it”, I’ve chosen to add the Indigenous neologism to our neutral English pronoun as a suffix, changing the way we speak of things in English from inanimate to animate ... Indeed, that syllable, “ki”, is a Potawatomi suffix meaning “from the living earth.” Thus, itki means that even what English sees as gender-neutral objects are in some sense alive.
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Indigenous Headwaters Voices: (L-R), Rick Chavolla, Keely Jock, Connor Ryan
and Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk
(photo by Art Goodtimes)
